Lioness, Returning
by The Junkiest Toon
Summary: Hermione Lannister returns home—sixteen years too late. Westeros will never be the same again. Part 1 of the Lannister Lioness Series.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note:

 _I do not own Game of Thrones, A Song of Ice and Fire, or Harry Potter—_

 _This will follow the storyline of Game of Thrones rather than A Song of Ice and Fire (though both are lovely)._

 _I've also nixed the Voldemort/Horcrux storyline._

 _Crossposted at ._

 _Also, I appear to be obsessed with Hermione Granger-crossovers in blended families. Sorry not sorry._

* * *

 **I. A New World**

 _Earth, Before Hogwarts_

This is not how it begins—

But this is what matters.

Hermione was not always Hermione Granger.

She becomes Hermione Granger when she is eight years old, through a flash of smoke and fire; it clings to her, dripping from her fingers and curling from her throat.

She appears and disappears and appears and the world she came from—spires and red-gold lions and screams—instantly dissolves into a world of noise. It was dark where she was before and it is dark where she enters now, but there are lights, two lights bright as suns and white, and the roar of lions.

An iron monster, a crate of metal teeth and snout, crashes into her, catching her on shin and shoulder and bouncing her skull into glass.

She bleeds onto the glass, the silk of her robe torn, red spreading through its gold-stitched lion, when a man and a woman exit the iron monster and rush to her. The man screams into a black brick he holds to his face and the woman is stroking her hair with shaking hands.

More lights appear, red-and-white suns, and there is noise unlike any horn she's ever heard.

"What is your name, sweetie?" the woman asks.

"Hermione," Hermione whispers as curtains draw shut around and she wishes desperately for Father. "Hermione Lannister."

* * *

She asks for Father first, Jamie second.

No response, but the people with her look at her wild-eyed. They are inside, four walls and one roof, but she has never seen a room this bright. It's a white light, brighter than the dawn, and there are people hovering over her, strangers, but they don't look like maesters in their blue baggy shirts and trousers and white overcoats.

There is white gauze on her wrist and knee and when she touches her head, her curls disappear into white gauze, too. She flinches.

She learns things very quickly: there is no Father here. No Jamie. No Rhaegar. No Queen Rhaella with her aching eyes and petal-soft touch.

That is because there are no white-haired Targaryens here, no green-eyed Lannisters. No Westeros.

Hermione is taking to a _police station_ where she meets with men who move like Father's knights. But they talk over her, interrupt her.

Not one of Father's knights dared to do that. She wants Jamie. She wants her big brother desperately.

A coldness spreads over her. She feels as if she is sinking into the Trident, hooked by her navel and yanked into its heavy depths—she leans against its pull, but she is dragged—its pressure concaves her chest . Water passes over her shoulders, her cheeks, her mouth. She can't breathe. She is inhaling _wet, wet, wet_.

She is drowning.

Something is tugging at her shoulders—river weeds, touching her face and hands and then there is _lightning—_

Her cheek burns. Jolted, Hermione prods the skin softly. She's in the _police_ station, with bright lights unlike any candle flame. She has been slapped. The man stands above her, worried, with one hand on the cuff of her neck.

He slapped her. _No one but Father did that._ Her fingers come away from her face slick. She's crying.

There's a noise, a horrible gasping noise that sounds like a stifled roar, hiccupping over and over.

The policeman raises his hand again, ready to strike, and Hermione shrinks up, constricts entirely, holds her breath.

It's only then that she realizes that the noise was her. _The noise was her._

Shards of memory twist with that noise, warp that sound into something familiar: _she's made that noise before. She's made that noise recently._

 _Begging. Screaming._

 _Oh Gods._

 _Princess Elia. Princess Rhaenys. Prince Aegon._

 _Smashed into bits. Oh Gods. Oh Gods oh gods. She saw it. She saw it happen, she saw it happen and it screamed and the blood, Aegon's blood was on the walls and Rhaenys was shrieking—_

There's a slap so hard her neck bounces to her other shoulder but Hermione leaps back into that watery darkness, welcomes it.

 _Oh Gods, please no._

* * *

She's assigned a _therapist_ , which reminds Hermione of a maester, though she's never seen a female maester before— _and_ this looks like no woman Hermione has ever seen, spikes on her feet and rimmed glass on her nose. The therapist blinks at Hermione owlishly when she says _maester,_ makes a little scrawl in a book.

She does not use a quill.

That action alone jolts Hermione. This world is not safe. She is not safe.

"Hermione," the Therapist says, after looking at a piece of parchment called _paper_ , with Hermione's glossy portrait—though she's never seen a portrait painted so lifelike—attached to its front. "Tell me about this Westeros."

She resists the urge to snort.

It's a trap with words, but Hermione is a Lannister, so she sees it. She's heard what the therapist and the policemen whisper. They call her _mad, crazy._

Those words are the same in Westerosi. King Aerys was called mad before he burned the northmen, before Jamie sliced him open with his sword.

These people call her mad, and it can only mean bad things.

So how to answer?

Hermione is a Lannister, so she is smart, methodical— _the smartest of all his children, even at eight, Father had said. Every maester said so._

She maps out the options in her head, like she would when Father would quiz her on High Valeryian or the families of the Great Houses.

1) Find Father. Find Jamie. No one loyal to Lannister here. No one to protect her. (That is always what concerned Father the most—her protection. When he had to leave King's Landing and she had to stay, he made Jamie promise. Jamie always keeps his promises.)

2) Think smart. Think like Father. Think of his lessons: _gain allies. Use them._

3) Father's most important lesson: _family comes first_ _._ (She has no family in this strange metal world.)

4) The secrets she keeps with Father, of Mother. Of what Hermione is. She daren't even think it. _One, two; blue, gold; fire and amber and blood._

Well. Hermione knows when a secret is vital to her safety. She has so many, Father ensured it. There's a fibrous ribbon knotting in her gut that tells her yes, _Weteros is a secret vital to her safety in this world._ Westeros and its memories of wildfire green as emeralds and bloody smears on creamy stone.

So option 4 then. She can't survive like in this world with these memories tendriling out her throat, drowning her eyes. Father would want her to survive. She has to survive. She buries the memories down deep, stamps on them, locks them into chests and hides the key in her ribs.

She stares right into the therapist's brown eyes and does exactly what she does to King Aerys, to Cersei, to the whole of Westeros: she lies.

" _Westeros? I made it up. A game."_

and

" _I really don't remember anything before my accident."_

and

" _I'm all alone."_ (That one's true, and it punctures her lungs just to saw it out loud.)

The therapist makes a little smudgy mark on her paper, smiles, and Hermione is free to leave. After three more visits, Hermione is fostered with the man and woman who ran her over with their _automobile_. Their automobile in _England._

The Grangers. They're _dentists._ Teeth Maesters. Frizzy haired, dark hair, dark eyes. Hermione, with her gold hair and whisky eyes, doesn't belong. But it has been her life work's pretending.

She and Father even fooled Cersei, after all.

* * *

Hermione cuddles into Mrs. Granger's arms, docile as a kitten. (In truth: it feels _so so so_ good to be held. She has not been held in so long. She misses Father. She wishes she could miss Mother more. She wonders if Mother would hold her like this, if she could.

Mother held her only the once, secretly, and it was _tight,_ full bodied, as if Mother knew she would never get the chance again. Mother whispered _I love you I love you I love you,_ her words almost swallowed by Jamie's pacing outside the door. Then Jamie signaled that King Aerys was returning and Mother pushed her away, retreated two steps.

King Aerys had eyes that remind Hermione of fishing: lovely, cool, but gleefully barbed. Waiting for you to mess up.

King Aerys was the one she had to fear most, Father had told her. _Be wary._

Then the King and Queen had stepped from the room, Jamie trailing, and Mother had never held Hermione like that again.

But after that night, in her silver bathtub, Hermione had touched the bruises that had burst along her skin, geranium petals that purpled and blued along her shoulders and hips and wrists, the pressure of Mother squeezing all the love she had into Hermione into that moment, and its only then, with the servants clucking over Hermione's bruises and combing through her tangled hair, that Hermione realizes the fear in her Mother's voice. Only then that she realizes how brave her Mother had been.

This is what she thinks about, with the Grangers.

* * *

She wanders when she dreams.

The man and woman have claimed her, adopted her, and Hermione Lannister has been swallowed up into Hermione Granger. The robes she arrived in were taken at the Police Station, and she has been given _denim_ and _knee socks_ and _penny loafers_. She is called Miss Granger at school, and she knows she is smarter than all of her schoolmates, she knows many languages and Bravossi exchange rates, but at school there are _calculators_ and _MTV_ and Hermione realizes she knows nothing at all.

(Hermione is Father's delight because she is the smartest, the quickest. She quivers to what he would think if he saw her now.)

But in her dreams she wanders away from this strange England, with its London Eye and metal beasts, and into Westeros. Into Home.

She dreams of King's Landing.

She dreams of how it was, instead of how she left it: she dreams of Princess Elia in her garden, a cool lattice of ivory and water-green blossoms overhead. In her dreams, Hermoine wants to climb into her lap, but Princess Elia has her arms full with little Rhaenys and baby Ageon. Aegon is hungry, his face scrunched up and red as an apple, and he screams and screams. Rhaenys is crying, and she pulls on Elia's dress—she wants to be held, too.

Hermione tries to pick up Rhaenys, to stroke that white hair that looks soft as kitten fur, but Rhaenys dodges out of her grasp.

In her dream, the edges blur sometimes—ink diluted to the very edge, but in its seam she sees a flash of gold. Jamie. Her older brother Jamie in his Kingsguard armor, gleaming like the copper sun, and in her dreams, he walks along the column, always keeping an eye out, but he does not do anything to help Elia.

It's excruciating, hearing Aegon wail. Elia rocks him in her arms, but he's hungry. Why won't she feed him?

"Let's play tag-and-fetch," Hermione whispers to Rhaenys. "Like we used to."

Rhaenys looks at her solemnly. Her lovely brown eyes seem hollow, rimming with shadow, overtaking pupil and blanketing the iris. "Why don't you go to your Mother?" she asks, her jaw sliding slackly, her flesh separating right at her nose and dragging her eyes into one cavernous eye socket. "Ask your Father if you can join us."

Maggots drip from the edges Rhaenys' skull onto the flat of her tongue, still moving, still talking—Hermione wakes up screaming.

Later, when Mrs. Granger cuddles Hermione and asks what she dreamed of, Hermione dreams of the therapist and lies: "I dreamed of lions. A circle of lions."

* * *

When Hermione is 11, she has pretended enough to fit into this world of _roller coasters_ and _marmite_ and _encyclopedias_ , pretended enough to be the top of all her classes, skipping grades.

Her hair's a wild mess, but so is Mrs. Granger's, so she encourages it, lets it fluff into herself. Mrs. Granger subconsciously appreciates it, and her eyes get all soft when she sees Hermione studying. Mr. Granger pecks her on the cheek, and off they go their practice, and off Hermione goes to school.

Hermione's on the Oxford-track when a letter arrives. A letter from a place called Hogwarts.

The name snags Hermione's attention immediately. Hogwarts is a funny name. Like Riverrun or King's Landing. A Westerosi-ish name.

She cracks open its red seal— _a seal! No one in this London uses seals—_ and when she reads its message, her memory claws her ribs in panic.

 _Dear Ms. Granger_ ,

 _We are pleased to inform you that you have been accepted at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry._ _Please find enclosed a list of all necessary books and equipment…_

It's her other secret. The one Father made her keep. Only Jamie and Lord Varys and Sandor Clegane know this secret. How could this Hogwarts have found out? Especially here, in this world so far away from Westeros—

The harsh roar of her breaths come back, and she grips her knees right above the kneesock, digs in her nails. _Keep calm. It's not possible. It's fake._

But even in this world, she has had her… _outbursts._

Small fires, exploding lightbulbs, levitating books. Mostly fires.

At King's Landing, Father used Sandor Clegane—she refuses to call him Ser—to scare her into hiding her magic. No more flowers blossoming from rings or fires held in her palm.

But this letter hints that magic is welcome, that magic has a home.

She scans the rest of the letter. There's a required materials list—books and parchment and—they use quills in this world. Parchment.

That alone sells her.

To Hogwarts she goes.

* * *

At Hogwarts, the Sorting Hat, tuts and frets about where to put her.

Hermione's does her research as any good Lannister would; she's prepared.

 _Slytherin_ is for those ambitious and pure in blood—but there are no Lannisters or Targaryeans here, and so Hermione would have no protection. She has been in a den of dragons before…she has no desire to be in a den of snakes.

 _Hufflepuff_ is for the good. Hermione is a liar by habit—she knows she is not good.

 _Ravenclaw_ is for the brilliant. Like Maesters. Hermione has always wanted to be a Maester. But she was to be Lady of Casterly Rock one day, not a master. Though now there is no Casterly Rock in Scotland so Hermione supposes she could be anything she wanted.

 _Gryffindor_. A gold lion rampant. Red, gold. Lannister colors. Lannister Lion. The home of the bold and the brave. It reminds her of Jamie, her dear sweet big brother Jamie who always protected her. Even at the end. Jamie, the golden hero of stories and songs.

She could be anything she wanted in England and she wants to be like Jamie. The Hero.

 _Gryffindor,_ she wishes, the hat low on her brow. _I want to be in Gryffindor._

* * *

The semester starts, and slowly, Hermione makes her own family: Harry, Ron, Neville, Ginny, Pavarti. Her brothers, her sisters. But she still remembers her blonde knight of a brother, golden and crimson-smeared. She still keeps him in her prayers to the Seven: _bless my brother with safety and peace, bless me so far from home, bless me to find my path._

Her path leads her to learning: broomsticks, potions, spells, _unicorns_.

But best is when Hagrid hatches a dragon. A dragon!

She has never seen anything as beautiful as Norbert cracking up from that purple egg. She is looking at a dragon, something no Targaryean had seen for hundreds of years.

A dragon. An actual dragon.

Her veins heat as she traces Norbert's delicate snout with her eyes—she doesn't dare touch him, not because she's afraid, but because she wants to _so badly_. She doesn't know what she'll reveal, not when everything in her wants to smooth the velvet snout and pet his leaf-green scales.

Norbert blinks at her.

 _They say Targaryeans have the blood of the dragon in them._

Hermione holds her breath. Her blood sings to him. She finds herself lost in the red-gold of his eyes, eerily mirroring the whisky of her own, but where there is recognition, it's faint, like when you remember a dream…

Norbert blinks twice and coughs a ring of smoke in her direction.

Hermione sighs in relief, risking a glance at Harry, at Ron. Harry is still fixated on Norbert, Hagrid cooing overhead, Ron worriedly looking from the dragon to the wooden table, the wooden chairs, the wooden thatch in the roof.

She smiles ruefully. Her sweet, thickheaded boys. Harry couldn't notice secrets or subtext if it smacked him in the face.

Her secret's still safe.

No one can know that this little lioness is also a dragon.

* * *

In third year, she faces a boggart.

She didn't get the chance to in Professor Lupin's class, and in truth, she held back, even when the rest of the class was clamoring to see a tarantula in neon rollerskates.

She had watched the room then, numb, realizing that these classmates were _children_. With the exception of Harry and maybe Neville, they had never seen real hardship. They had never seen death or known true pain. Even bonding with fighting nightmares like Quirrell and a troll, these children had never heard screams like the screams she heard coming from King Aerys court.

She saw them carry the Northmen's bodies out that day: Starks, one charred so badly he was ash-gray, and the other with a face purple and bloated, a rope still dangling around the neck.

Harry hears his mother screaming when the dementors come.

That's horrific. Hermione won't pretend it's not.

But she hears Northmen screaming and the people of King's Landing screaming against the green crackle of wildfire and Princess Elia howling with a soldier on top of her, hurting her, holding her, breaking her—she sees the Mountain squishing Rhaenys' skull like an egg, blood and brain and curl slushing around his hands. In the dementor's chill, Hermione remembers anger. Her anger, beating at the Mountain with her tiny fists, trying to tug the Mountain off of little Rhaenys, and she remembers how the Mountain had swiveled onto her and put his great hands on either side of her head—one hand over each ear—and she could hear his pulse, or maybe it was her own pulse, and he squeezed—

and in that moment, Hermione thought _Jamie,_ and then after, _Elia. Rhaenys, Aegon,_ and then she thought, _alright, fine, I'm not afraid to die._ And she had wanted her last thought to be anger, furious anger, she wanted to alight the Mountain with curses for what he did to those she loved, and she wanted to die in hatred—

And then Varys had run in, perfumed face streaked with soot, hands out of his sleeves, and he had fallen to his knees, sobbing, "She's a Lannister! She's a Lannister!"

And the Mountain removed his hands, slunk off.

Hermione slid to the stone, head stuttering, her dress still smeared with blood, but she doesn't know whether or not it was Elia's or Rhaenys'. It's not Aegon's. They smashed him against the farthest wall, the blood couldn't have reached her.

Varys had gathered her up…he's Mother's man, through and through. He carried her out of the room where the Targaryean heirs had been utterly, senselessly destroyed. She had wondered then if he was thinking what she was thinking: _if the Mountain had known…if anyone had know that she was as much a Targaryean as a Lannister, it would be her blood sinking into the cushions, her blood sprayed on the tapestries._

She had whimpered, digging her fingers into Lord Varys' collar.

The air had smelled like violence. Copper in the nose.

One day, she had promised to herself, she will see the Mountain die.

Lord Varys had met her eyes, red-rimmed hazel to her gold, sunspots that lingered on the back of her eyelids long they were separated: _They can't know. They have no idea. They can never hurt me if they don't what I am._

She thinks on that when she and Lord Varys are separated and Baratheon attacks shake the Red Keep. She thinks on this even she falls, through space and air, blue fire circling darkness. She thinks on this when she pops into England, when the Grangers first hit her with their automobile: _They can never hurt me if they don't know what I am._

The horrors of the boggart and dementor for her are not spiders or Snape or vipers. How could they be, when she knows true horror?

Of course, she fails the boggart test. She lies, as she is so good at doing, and tells Professor Lupin she saw Professor McGonagall as the boggart instead.

She doesn't know how she else she could explain the boggart that _R-r-r-ridikulous_ kept cracking between a dead babe, a dead child, and a dead woman.

 _R-r-r-ridikulous_.

She makes their bodies disappear into a vortex of fire, the laugh sounding false even to her ears, but the boggart falls away: _a true dragon does not burn._

* * *

Hermione dissolves her worries and secrets into magic. She excels at flames, bluebell flames that she keeps in jars. They remind her of Mother.

But then Voldemort tries to kill Harry first year. And second year. And third year. Fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh.

Hermione is mostly able to bury down the self of her—little Hermione Lannister with more secrets than Lord Varys—into Hermione Granger. Hermione Granger loves to read. Hermione Granger gets the best marks. Hermione Granger is brave.

Hermione Granger can be the hero. Hermione Granger can save her friends.

Hermione Granger looks at the children of Hogwarts, at the _ickle firsties_ , young and dirtsmudged and freckled and brand-new, barely experiencing life, living lives Aegon and Rhaenys never got to live.

(She doesn't talk about it, never never, but they still haunt her. Rhaenys and her broken bloodied face still crop up in her dreams. She makes a promise: she will fight for the children. Always for her family and children.

She will the hero like Jamie. Father taught her to be smart, Jamie taught her to fight, Mother taught her the power of secrets.

She gets to work.

* * *

 **II. Being the Hero**

Earth, Seventh Year

 _This is not how it ends._

This is Hermione's one wish: _don't let this be how it ends. Not here._

Not in the Department of Mysteries, with the Order clambering over their own dead in order to fight.

Not with George Weasley ( _George_!) bleeding out onto the stone pavers, red confetti streamers on gray, Fred bellowing over him.

Not with Neville and Luna fighting back-to-back, Neville's wand half-cracked and sizzling. Soon it will give. Soon he won't be able to fight. Luna will protect him for as long as she able, Hermione knows. She will snarl over his body until the Death Eaters tear into her.

 _Over her cold corpse,_ Hermione thinks _,_ ducking under a blue curse andswinging one of her dual longknives just under a Deatheater's silver mask—from his voice, she would guess Macnair. She hacks the knife down, straight across the throat. Red spews into her face, her eyes, but she blinks through it, stabbing out against another deatheater with one hand, slashing her other wandhand in a tight arc: _Bombarda_ —

Two Death Eaters explode, half of them here, half of them there, and Hermione steps over a mess of kidney and liver and brain matter to attack the second wave. She needs to get to the entrance, bottleneck them from coming in.

They've held them off for this long, but Harry needs more time.

She makes eye contact with Luna, who nods jerkily. Luna knows the plan, Neville knows the plan, Fred knows the plan, George—George knew the plan.

 _This is not how it ends._

Hermione leaves them, never looking back though her heart is stringing with their voices, their faces. These are those she loves. These are those she will kill for, die for. She ascends to the entrance room alone, seventeen and golden and itching to kill.

* * *

 _Dumbledore let children fight his war for him._

 _Well. She is no one's fucking footsoldier._

 _All hail her monstrosity._

* * *

Five more Death Eaters and three werewolves funnel through the doorway, and Hermione snarls, tightens her grip on blade and wand. She casts a shield, filmy and purple and deceptively gelatinous, before advancing. The wizards busy themselves with trying to get around her shield, but it's entirely unoriginal. It's the werewolves she's worried about. They circle her, trying to get the higher ground, trying to get behind.

She keeps her sword up, arms tight, like Jamie taught her. She's stunningly grateful for her basilisk armor—Ron's gift to her before he died; he and Harry went back down into the Chamber and "repurposed" it.

One of the werewolves—Fenrir's, by the brand on his cheek—lunges at her and she catches his teeth with her sword, a beveling of the jaw, and he lurches down, half of his face a ruby flap. The other one leaps, a tornado of knives and fangs and claws, but Hermione twists, step one two three up, a pirouette of steel and footwork she learned from Jaime. The werewolf crumples around her knife in a surge of hot copper and piss-soaked skin.

One of the Death Eaters throws a sour apple-green hex to her shield and its first layer cracks, candy glass, but they don't dare come closer until her shield is down. They fear her knives.

She can hear Neville, distantly, shouting in the rooms beyond her but she can't turn to look. "C'mon, love," she croons to the remaining werewolf. "Let's dance—"

But this werewolf is older, and the old ones respect fighters.

There are two types of soldiers, Father used to say. The ones who fear blood and the ones who drink it.

 _Guess what she is?_

A Lannister.

She growls and leaps and slashes, and though she is tiny she is mighty and oh how she roars.

When she is done the werewolf is dead, her shield is still in place, and she has blood on her lip. She can't help herself: her tongue flits out to taste it.

It's not hers. She knows that much.

It's _hot_. Sweet.

Her vision dazzles into shades of rose and she is very aware of every breath in the room, every heartbeat, their temperature. She feels like a lion, a dragon.

Behind her shield, the wizards shuffle impatiently, too afraid to combat her openly.

She laughs and shuffles from one foot to the other, getting her blood hopping.

 _C'mon c'mon c'mon c'mon._

She'd rather they face her like this, with blood on her chin and her hands and her sword. Come and get her.

But they wait, throwing curses at her shield until it looks like webbing.

Hermione tucks her wand in her holster, unstraps the other knife from her back. Longer than her whole arm and entirely wicked, the knives gleam under the fading lavender light of her shield.

She breathes like a bull from her nose.

It matters more, to fight like this.

Wandwizards are so textbook with their fighting. Slash here, shield here, curse here. The highest curse wins, _aces._ Bellatrix taught her that.

Knowledge is power, Hermione knows. So Hermione learned their curses, their spells, read their secrets texts. _The Brightest Witch of her Age._ But even the Brightest could fall to a person willing to use an Avada. Nothing can stop that.

So Hermione learned those, too. After Ron died.

After Ron died and she remembered all that she could still lose.

But Harry disapproved. _Dumbledore wouldn't have wanted this_ , he had said. _Please, Hermione_.

 _Dumbledore let children fight his war for him,_ she wanted to scream. _How many children will still breathe in Hogwarts?_

(She didn't tell Harry her thoughts weren't just on Hogwarts and its children but on another castle, far away, an impossible castle, an almost-forgotten castle, with ivory belfries and wind that carried the smell of the sea and dragon skulls in the basement. She didn't tell Harry that she remembered what happened when the enemy swarmed that castle—what happened to that castle's children.)

 _Rhaenys. Aegon._

Butchered and bloodied.

But Hermione did remember this impossible, dissipated thing ( _there is no Westeros to go back to, nothing but Hogwarts and Harry)_ , but she loved Harry, too—so she offered an exchange. A compromise.

She asked for the Sword of Gryffindor.

When she melted it down into two lighter longknives, Harry cried. Cried.

 _It was too heavy,_ she had told Harry softly. _I can use it now._ Little-bird Harry. Soft. Tremulous heartbeat, easily cradled. Easily crushed.

Hermione knows: she is no little bird. She is teeth, hunger, the beast of Ravin.

Harry stopped crying when she brought him Bellatrix's head.

She will eat the way before him, breathe forth ruin and destruction to his enemies. She will save Harry.

Her shield quivers then and splashingly evaporates, a mountain falling into a pond, and its wave pushes her off her feet. But she scissors out with her knives. She cuts through Death Eaters like softened butter. Wizards don't fight with knives ( _knowledge is power)_ but Hermione is no mere witch. Jaime taught her. And what she remembers she uses.

If she's honest, she likes the hot of their blood on her hands. If she's honest, she likes to see how they quake in fear in front of the Mudblood. If she's honest, she likes being a wild thing.

It's a current in her blood, a tsunami, it comes crashing, gushing, sweeping and sometimes it washes redly over her eyes, gingerous behind the lids, and Hermione disappears into ferociousness. _Gryffindor Lioness,_ the Order call her, in fear, in awe.

(Hermione smiles at that: she was a Lioness long before she was Gryffindor's.)

But the point is this: she will protect her pack. And there is no way in this world or the next or Westeros (wherever that exists now) that she will let them all die in the remnant of the Department of Mysteries, of all places.

(Hermione doesn't care how she dies but she cares how Harry does: old, thick in the middle, surrounded by dozens of fat grandbabies.)

No, Hermione does not want this to be where it ends. The return to the Department of Mysteries was a stupid mistake. Harry's idea, of course. Draw Voldemort away from Hogwarts, Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley. End it here.

But The Order is outnumbered. Desperately outnumbered.

 _This is not how it ends._

The ceiling shakes. The columns shiver, dust and stone shavings coating the air like tossed flour.

Voldemort has arrived.

* * *

Harry duels Voldemort in a crimson splash of glass and scissoring light. They burst and dazzle, Voldemort overhead, Harry below, green and red and white, scaly wreaths and serpentine arcs.

It's terrifying.

Each spell gets so close to Harry, her brother, Harry of the dark hair and green eyes, Harry who thinks that tonight he is going to die.

 _This is not how it ends._

He has climbed up the stone stretch to the veil, an attempt to get the high ground in his battle, but all Hermione can think is—this is the very spot where Sirius died. And Harry knows it.

Below, Hermione is cutting a swath through Death Eaters, carving and punching and casting, and there is red stuttering in her mouth and her eyelids.

This is the whole of Harry's plan: cut off the head of the snake and the body will die.

This is the whole of Hermione's plan: keep Harry from making plans in the future; save Harry.

Hermione doesn't see Luna—is she already dead? If Luna is dead, then Neville is, too.

All dead, all gone—Ron, George, the Creevy Brothers, Percy, Padma, Malfoy, Remus, Professor Dumbledore, Professor Flitwick, maybe Luna, maybe Neville, maybe Fred.

Still blessedly living: Ginny, Hagrid, Kingsley, Tonks, Mrs. Weasley, Mr. Weasley, Bill, Charlie, Fleur, Professor McGonnagall, and Harry. That's who she focuses on: Harry.

Dead Death Eaters form a mountain at her feet but Voldemort remains.

She is too focused on Harry and doesn't a dodge a spell—she catches Fiendfyre full in the face but she screams through its scourge, breathes through it, hears her Father's voice in her head: _They can't know. They have no idea. They can never hurt if they don't know what you are._

 _They don't know what you are._

So she howls and swings both swords blindly until her vision clears and she is breathing heavily, her vision tunneling into pinpricks. The clothes she wore over her basilisk armor are burned, the leather bands and scabbard around her back are singed completely, but she is fine. She is fine. As expected: _Fire cannot burn a true dragon._

She's a survivor. Always. She scrambles to the Veil, to Harry.

 _Save Harry. Cut the head off the snake._

Her breath is wet and comes in snarls.

Harry tosses an Avada at Voldemort, which Voldemort ducks—Hermione throws Fiendfyre at him, inhales, breathes deep, sulphur in her lungs and blood, and she howls—fire tunnels at him, billows, moving like a dragon, eating, engulfing—she can hear a shrill screams, the heat rippling the air.

 _Finish him, Harry._

Harry aims true, fires an Avada to the heart and Voldemort pauses—head raw and pink from the flames, his eyes open wide, mouth open, and he looks almost comical…this is the big bad they've all been fighting, this was their storybook villain, and in death he looks so stunned.

Voldemort flops to Hermione's feet, still and silent. The Veil ripples behind her and Voldemort dead at her feet…how about that?

Better safe than sorry. She swings her sword, swift and sure: cut the head off the snake.

Look at that: monsters can be destroyed. She pulls Voldemort's head and almost snorts at how horrified he looks.

Voldemort's greatest fear was death. Hermione's is dying before she can avenge. There's so much to avenge now.

At least Voldemort is dead now. She holds Voldemort's head and says a prayer to the seven over Ron's soul: _Mother and Stranger, watch over him._

Hermione hands Voldemort's head to Harry who looks simultaneously relieved, proud, horrified—in fact, he looks as if he's going to vomit.

She pats his shoulder. "We did, hero. It's over."

And a grin spreads over his face—she can see his tongue, his smile all teeth, and Harry looks so happy and young—

It distracts her.

She doesn't hear the _Avada Kedavra._

* * *

She falls back, smiling, Harry and Fred screaming and screaming, their faces rushing away as if they were passengers on a train, the noise gathered into a train whistle, high and continuous and growing louder and louder— _she is on the platform and they are on the train and away they go—_ the ones she loves smear into lipstick blots, crimson and orange and violet:

She drops her wand. Falls.

The gray linen of the veil brushes over her face, her wrists, her knees. She tumbles into it completely.

And is gathered into darkness.

* * *

 **III. Lioness Returning**

 _North of Winterfell_

Hermione wakes in snow. She's awake. She's alive.

All of this is secondary to the fact that she is freezing and she is snow.

Mountains of it, icing her elbows, the back of her knees. She can't feel her thighs. She shakes awake, teeth chattering.

She sits up, her basilisk armor doing nothing to stop the cold. There is a mountain of white in the distance, a plain of white thick as a polar bear's fur, and a forest of redleaved, white-trunked trees—

Blood red leaves, bone-white trunks.

A Weirwood tree.

Weirwood means Westeros.

She's in Westeros. She's home.

* * *

 _Notes:_

 _Never fear, Hermione Lannister lives!_

 _Next chapter, the story continues in Westeros, where Hermione Granger/Lannister gets a surprise about the timeline._

 _The story will pick up 17 years after Robert's Rebellion, when King Robert and Queen Cersei visit the Starks at Winterfell._


	2. Chapter 2: A Place Like Home

Author's Note:

 _WHHHHHHHHAT? A CHAPTER?_

 _The only answer I have for you is that therapy works. I'm writing again. (Go to therapy everyone! Everyone needs it.)_

 _Thank you to all of the reviewers! This chapter is dedicated to all of you, with a special shout out to Rainbow_Foxes on A03. Thanks for lighting the fire under this chapter._

* * *

 **Chapter 2: A Place Like Home**

 _North of Winterfell_

First, she screams.

She cries, she slaps the snow and begs, actually begs. She throws her blades as far as she can and they tumble in the snow. She says Harry's name over and over, and she _just doesn't understand._

How did she get here? Why here, why home, at long last but too late? Why now and not when she was eight and scared and alone in a vast and metal world?

It doesn't make sense. How could she come here now, when as a child, that was all she had tried to do? When at 15, she had tried apparating to Casterly Rock, hands fisted so tightly she drew blood, and she exhaled before the sound of a hollow pop, but she found herself exactly where she had started, not a hair forward or backward. These are the rules of apparition: you cannot find a place that doesn't exist.

No, Hermione thinks, dizzily, and the moments streak with tears, like failed and dirty windshield wipers. _A world without windshield wipers._

— _Breathe, breathe, breathe_. No, she can't be home, not now, not at last. It doesn't make sense.

Perhaps…perhaps this is something else entirely.

Is this her death? Green light, the veil, a land of snow and Weirwood trees?

Dumbledore had said that death was a train, a platform of loved ones long since gone.

She had hoped for it—that Death would have the screech of brakes on wheels and there, like an apparition in the train's smoke, would be a ginger head. Ron's. Then two, then three. George, Percy. Maybe brown-and-shabby Remus would be there too, and he would gather her in a hug, and she would smell parchment and ink, and when he released her she would see his old white scars melt away. Maybe Remus would look like he had woken up from the sweetest sleep. And then Ron—always impatient, always possessive—would swoop in and kiss her and she would hear bells and train whistles and she would never ever let go of his hand. Then the others would leave the platform, shadows in the mist, but she and Ron would pick a comfortable bench, and wait the sweet years for Harry. They would take turns and guess whether it would be a stooped and gray Harry that would meet them, or whether it would be a Harry round with Mrs. Weasley's cooking. In the end, it would always be she-Ron-Harry, because how could it not be?

It was the death she wanted. The death she earned. The family she earned.

She remembers the green light of the Avada and a train whistle, but no platform, no Hogwarts Express carriage with velvet seats and licorice wands—

 _Wand. Wand. Where is her wand?_

 _Sweet gods._

She claws through the snow frantically, sifting for golden vinewood. The snow around her looks as if a hippogriff has stamped through it, but she comes up empty.

 _She tumbled through the Veil and she dropped it she dropped it where is it?_

She walks in long, unsteady circles, looping in and out of the Weirwood trees, shivering, until her tears are freezing on her cheeks. Her lashes are stiff with ice, but Hermione knows she must not rub them or they will come off.

It is not until night veils the snow in panes of cooled amber and shadow that she admits her wand is gone.

 _The unjustice of it. After everything._

 _Even in death._

Death (for this is Death, she decides, for what else could it be? No one but Harry can survive an Avada) is cold, a hellscape of winter with strange, fiery beauty. Hermione breathes into her hands. She supposes it is her blood— _a dragon inside roars_ —that keeps her from freezing entirely, but perhaps one cannot freeze in their own Hell.

It's strange: Hermione has lied, Hermione has lusted, Hermione has had sex—has loved sex—Hermione has hated, Hermione has killed ( _over and over and over_ , _and she would yet kill again_ ), but still she did not think she merited this lonely Hell.

She does not deserve this.

If she deserves Hell, Voldemort does and Dumbledore does and Bellatrix does but Malfoy (Draco, she quietly acknowledges) does not.

She would grant him that small mercy.

But perhaps he's in his own Hell, too. If hers is cold and scarlet leaves, a ghost of home, maybe his is too. Maybe his hell is a mudslide through his manor, bits of twigs and rocks everywhere, a whole treetrunk through his window, and he tries to clean his face but his hands always come up muddy. ("Mudblood," she remembers him saying the very last time, when he twitched suddenly in her arms and he looked like a first-year. Small. Scared.)

Grangers may be small and scared, but not Gryffindors or Lannisters. Not Targaryeans. Hermione snorts into her palm, exhausted. What to do?

She asks the stars, trails the constellations with prayers, but the Crone's Lantern is silent. The Sword of the Morning is silent. The Shadowcat, King's Crown, and Sow, is silent.

How funny, Hermione thinks as windshield wiper tears blur and unblur her vision—it's a world away, under different stars, but she swears the tip of King's Crown could be Polaris: shiver-bright and bursting through the North sky.

* * *

Hermione startles, a sudden jolt of sound and light quaking her like thunder.

Ice coats her nails, her nostrils. The ends of her hair are stiff.

She must've fallen asleep.

She flails for the source of the noise, and rocketing towards her is a black stallion, white-eyed and heavy-coated. Its rider is swathed in lanternlight and black leathers that flap in the wind, and she is so stunned by this sudden apparition into her private hell that she almost misses the broadsword he swings.

He swipes at her head, and it catches her hair, maybe her ear, she doesn't know, because everything is suddenly whistling—steel to scalp and arctic to flesh, and the horse rears in front of her, forelegs striking the air, and down comes that flashing sword again.

Hermione forgets all thoughts of Hells and Lannisters and Potters and Grangers and dives. A hoof almost collides on her face, near-stomping on her skull.

Her attacker's hood falls. And then, with dreadful trickling alarm, she recognizes him. She knows this face: the almond eyes, the fine chiseled features of the dead Northman carted from King Aerys' throne room. All brothers look alike, if you look for it.

He's a Stark.

Which one she doesn't know, and she doesn't guess, because the sword swipes—

Hermione catches the blade on the cuff of her basilisk-clad shoulder. The blade pops off of the scales with the shriek of steel on glass, but the impact forces her to her knees. She can see the glint of her thrown longknives a good dozen meters off.

The size of a secondary Potions classroom, yet the man stands in between.

"Wildling!" The Stark-man curses, though he sounds as bewildered at her appearance as she was to his.

 _Wildling?_ Father had warned her of the stupidity of Northmen.

The Stark-man shouts again, but she misses the words because she is too busy dodging, watching, seeking out a weakness, there—in the horse's left-leaning gait, in the unsure way the idiot's elbow rolls with the blow. An old injury.

One last swing from his sword, and it surely would have halved her at the eyebrows, but she parries with the armor at her crossed wrists, catching the blow and rocking to her heels, and it stings so sharp she worries that the edge has sliced through, basilisk armor or not, cutting right through to her bones.

But she isn't, he hasn't, and so she rockets through her thighs, pushing against him, twisting her baskilisk-scaled arms on both sides of that sharp, sharp blade, and she locks, and pulls, and _twists to the right,_ and it is enough to loosen his grip on his sword.

It skitters far more than she would have guessed, and as he lurches away from his saddle to seek it out, she goes to the opposite direction, towards her longknives.

She has time to grab one.

In that same instant, she hears the whistle of a blade towards her back before she registers the man behind her. She ducks, bringing the blade against his before it comes crushing down, the blow jarring wrist to armbone, and it _hurts,_ but all she needs is an opening—

He's larger, but she's quicker. And more flexible. She angles the blocking blade, and strikes a glancing kick to that injured elbow. He swears, near-dropping his sword. He manages to keep his grip, but his arm shakes.

She's on the offense now, targeting his elbow with every forward strike. This she likes. She's rubbish with defense, anyway—that was always Ron's purview. How to strike, how to wound, how to make them kneel and beg, that was hers.

He falters in his steps, and that's enough for her twist outside his radius and tap her blade against his throat. The Northman stills. When she applies pressure, he drops his sword, kneels. He gasps noisily.

Game, set, match.

With her blade safely against the flap of tender skin between his jaw and windpipe, she takes the time to study him. In another light, in another life, she might call him a Black. Sirius had the same narrow-eyed wariness. A man who served a life sentence in Azkaban, and a man of the Night's Watch, and the pinched horror they share.

Her love for Sirius is almost enough to distract her from the fact that her shoulder will be one bruised rose.

"Where are we?" She demands. "We're North, but how far North?"

He spits redly into the snow. She furrows her brow. She hadn't hurt him that much. Perhaps he bit his tongue in the scuffle? "Westeros, Wildling. You will answer to the King's Law."

And—Hermione's had a _very_ hard day. She's lost her family, potentially died, potentially ended up in hell, and now a fucking _Stark_ won't use his fucking brain.

"I know we're in Westeros, Stark," she hisses. "Do I look a fucking wildling to you?"

Honestly, she's never seen a wilding in the flesh either, but all of Varys' stories depict them as furred savages, so.

He blinks far too slowly at her. "You know me," he says, and she knows she is being measured, so she draws herself to her full height, and hopes his eyes are not on her breasts or lips but on the blood welting above her ear, the scaled pattern of her armor, the snow melting in her breath.

"Aye," she says. "So you better answer rightly."

She pivots the blade just a nick, and it may have drawn blood as it scratched against the scruff.

So? You learn from scars, and it had been a terrible day, one of the worst of Hermione's life. At least he'd learn to answer quickly now.

"North of Winterfell," comes his strangled reply. "About a two days' ride."

Winterfell. The home of the Starks, a clan as cold and gray and stalwart as the stone under the snow. Their sigil was a direwolf, but as he wears none, and by his all-black, she guesses that he is serving at the Wall. At the Night's Watch.

 _We are the shield that guards the realms of men._

Yes—his face is haggard enough to be so devoted.

"And what would make a Night's Watch Ranger leave his post?" He doesn't startle at his identification as a Ranger, so he must be learning quickly—analyzing her as she analyzes him.

His throat swallows twice before he speaks. "The King rides for Winterfell."

She stares. A king to ride so far north to Winterfell? And who would be King now that Aerys (she shudders at visions of flames as green as beetles)—Aerys is dead. Long dead. She holds onto that thought. He must've been dead for (she does the math quickly: she was eight when she was left, and she's seventeen now) nine years. Nine blessed years free of Aerys. How Westeros must rejoice.

After Aerys, it would be Rhaegar in line, but Rhaegar is surely gone. He ruined the Starks, or it was a Stark who ruined _him_. And his children are all dead.

( _And no, she doesn't tear apart at the memory, even if her veins burn.)_

But Aerys still had a son, Viserys, though she quietly believes him to follow the same fate as Rhaenys and Aegon. She imagines Viserys on the throne, his child-face still pinched. Draco had reminded her of Viserys—white-haired and beautiful, in a narrow ferret-face way. There has been a Targaryean ruling in Westeros for 300 years, but perhaps the dragon line is gone.

 _Her terrible secret burns in the silence._

But if there is a Stark in the Nights Watch, then it was either because a King forced them (like Jaime in his Gold Cloak posting), or it was because there was already a Lord and Lordling in the Stark house.

She had watched the eldest, Brandon Stark, die. Eddard Stark, then, must be Lord of Winterfell. Or a son in his place as he rules—it was Eddard who was leading the charge against the Targaryeans she remembers, though he was on the battlefield, not the attack on the keep. He would have the right to rule by conquest, if not by blood.

She tries to picture a gray-faced King on the Iron throne.

"The King?" And she tries to make it a statement, she really does, but it's inevitably a question, and when he doesn't speak again, she hazards, "King Eddard?"

His gaze falls so shrewdly it has a touch of McGonagall in it. Snow falls between them, and in that time, Hermione knows she has made a colossal, colossal mistake.

Not King Eddard then. Not even close.

"King Robert Baratheon, First of His Name, King of the Andals and the First men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms, and Protector of the Realm." And oh, how this Stark's lip curls. He has ferreted out that she doesn't quite belong. It was the look Pansy Parkinson gave her on that first train to Hogwarts.

She's shocked at a Baratheon on the throne, she won't lie. They don't have the ancient foothold of the Starks or the clout of the Lannisters, but maybe a lot has changed in nine years.

"And Jamie—Jaime Lannister?" Tears prickle, but she blinks them in the snow. It won't do for her eyes eyelids to freeze. If she's shown her hand, she doesn't care, she presses on.

"Does he still serve this king?" _Is he alive_ , she wants to scream.

He killed Aerys for her. Perhaps Robert Baratheon would have spared him for that.

" _Ser,_ " comes the correction, filled with a scorn true to the North, and there's that McGonagall twitch again, for she called him _Jamie_ and not _Ser_. She knows that's another piece of information this Stark is filing away. "Oathbreaker. Man without Honor! Can such a one serve a King?"

Hermione stares. Moves the longknife even closer. "The King rides for Winterfell, you say? Jamie will be with him?"

The Stark—Benjamin, Benjeen, Benjen…the name of a third son of a great house was never important to know. Whatever his name, this Stark man is puzzling her out. His eyes dart to his fallen sword. "You know me yet you don't know the year, the king, the Kingsslayer—"

She flinches.

"—You fight like a wildling. Or a knight."

She grins at that, and for a clear, sweet moment, she can picture Jamie perfectly in her mind. Her brave brother. Gleaming and golden and alive, and she, like him.

He must be alive; otherwise the Stark wouldn't be so snide, so venemous.

"Jamie Lannister will ride with the King to Winterfell," she repeats, a plan already forming.

This death is no hell, no purgatory. This is a marvel—the once impossible chance to be Hermione Lannister once more, in Westeros once more..

Father, Jamie.

She will be whole again.

Hermione eyes the man kneeling in front of her, plan cemented. "How good are your legs?"

* * *

She steals his horse.

She leaves him his shaggy cloak, his swords, his flask, his lantern. Everything but his horse, really. Rangers were made for the North, so he'll travel slow, but she's certain he'll make it out alive, as long as he avoids crevices with shadowcat lairs.

Nudging the weather-worn stallion (she names him Casterly) south to Winterfell, their pace is rigorous. This stallion was Northbred, probably even journeying North of the Wall, she imagines, and Casterly churns through the snow easily. She must arrive at Winterfell before the King leaves, for where the King will be, the Kingsguard goes, and where the Kingsguard goes, Jamie is.

Jamie will find her. She will see his sunstreaked armor first, and then he will see her, soldier to soldier, and then—then Hermione Lannister will return to Father's hall, to Casterly Rock. She will sleep in her scarlet-striped room and hear the sea break on the rocks, and she can rest, a sleep such as she has never known since her fall.

And all will be well.

* * *

Author's Note:

 _Nothing is ever well in Westeros. Poor Hermione, as she'll soon find out._

 _You may have noticed that Hermione did not question after Robert's queen._

 _More surprises, including about the timeline, await! Thank you for your support and patience. It's been rough. Thank you. Thank you._


End file.
